Landscape design

Disturbing times at the Biennale

In Venice, the 58th edition of the Contemporary Art Exhibition, curated by Ralph Rugoff puts the spotlight on the violence we soak up from wars, bomb attacks and videogames. And on our anxieties about a world increasingly dominated by machines

A lot of noise, machine gun fire and shouting. The quite shocking sounds that form the backdrop to the 58th International Venice Art Exhibition are perhaps the most powerful theme running through the show, which this year’s American curator Ralph Rugoff has entitled May You Live in Interesting Times (until 24 November). Ever alert to the things happening around them, the artists involved have picked up on the changes taking place and given expression to visions and fears, so a visit to the Art Biennale is a bit like a collective psychoanalysis session, helping to bring to the surface what are sometimes very painful repressed thoughts. Rugoff’s “interesting times” remind us that we are living in an age of unprecedented, overwhelming violence.

It’s not that we are unaware of the many wars going on in the world, the repeated terrorist attacks and the killings carried out by society’s loose cannon (an excellent video by Christian Marcley in the first room at the Arsenale is a reminder for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention: a kaleidoscopic collage of war films, whose soundtrack is an insane sequence of explosions and groans).

But Rugoff’s telling of the story also includes another kind of violence that slips under the radar because it falls into the “games” and “entertainment” category. Jon Rafman’s grotesque animated video Dream Journal features the obsessive, disquieting sounds of an animated videogame and a narrative sequence out of control (comparable to Miyazaki’s Enchanted City) that piles on the absurdities and causes an adrenalin rush. Noise is also a prominent feature of a work by Teresa Margolles at the Arsenale – large glass walls that screech and vibrate horribly, like when a train goes by (dedicated to violence on women in Mexico) – and of the two installations by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: at the central pavilion in the Giardini, a giant mechanical arm closed inside a glass-walled space writhes around like a wild animal, brandishing a huge paintbrush and throwing red paint at the windows; at the Arsenale an air pump wraps itself around an oversized imperial Roman armchair like a crazed, hissing serpent.

So, added to the already difficult present, is the prospect of a not-too-distant future in which robots and virtual reality will play an increasing though still difficult to imagine role. Other reflections on the theme are provided by Martine Gutierrez (with her “plasticised worlds”), Stan Douglas (who imagines the consequences of a power outage in New York), Kaari Upson (whose life-size doll’s house is like the set of a horror movie populated by part human, part post-human doppelgangers) and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (a business meeting where everyone is wearing a virtual reality viewer). Other offerings are a bit more cheerful, although the feeling of unease is never far away. Take, for example, Alex De Corte’s hypnotic, energised choreographies, a perfect cross between an advertisement and a cartoon, and the virtual garden designed by Hito Steyerl: a dark space where beautiful flowers endlessly bloom and wither on large screens. And there is something rather disturbing about the wonderful (and apparently harmless) Crochet Coral aquariums by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, made from colourful, luminescent threads crocheted using an algorithmic technique to create hyperbolic shapes, invented by Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina. They are a tribute to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s Queensland coast, which in the “interesting times” to come, the experts say, will be destroyed by the effects of climate change.

Up to 20 September the Palazzina dei Giardini in Modena, a historic eighteenth-century...

27 May 2020

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places